Stu Ward
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Let thy food be thy medicine, and thy medicine be thy food.~Hippocrates
Strength is the adaptation that leads to all other adaptations that you really care about - Charles Staley
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Thanks TimD

Prior to Practice Day, a five week program of top sets of 5, except for deads which had their own thing going.

PRACTICE DAY. June 30th, just over 4 months before meet, we did a practice meet to get numbers, and identify weaknesses. Weakness is bench, for squat and dead right now if I train I get better.

Phase I. Right after practice day, five weeks of triples and singles. Culminated in PR attempts that were successful again for dead and squat but not bench.

Phase I Deload. The actual purpose here was to see what benefited in Phase II from the deload. Dead and squat were unaffected, neither helped nor harmed. Bench went down. Sam's conclusion was that he wants no deload on bench before meet, we may bench heavy as late as 3 days before meet. Staying warm on bench seems to be more important than getting the rest.

Phase II. Three weeks + deload. A 3-2-1 program, triples week 1, then doubles, then a PR attempt single at end. Just finished this, made PR on Squat and Dead, and we scrapped the bench program and scratched our heads a bit.

Phase II Deload. In this right now. Actually doing 10 singles at 70% on squat and dead as "deload", but I'm allowed to goof off on the accessories. Bench we are keeping heavy (just did 5x5 yesterday) to maintain mental energy, and because we already know I'm not lifting heavy enough to need a rest.

Phase III, begins next week, last 4 weeks until meet. Sam says we'll be building to a lot of singles.

The program is designed to produce a peak on meet day. Some of the timing was set up to measure how to achieve that. So we know that squat and dead do not lose from a deload, so we'll do a rest in the week before the meet, but as I said bench we'll keep up the pressure.

Jungledoc wrote:Ken, I'd be interested in your last weeks of prep for the meet, as well as the meet itself.

Although "Game day" is 16 days away (who's counting?), at this point it is already game day, as everything I do now affects what will happen on the platform.

Tuesday's squat session was the first bad session in months, but yesterday was bench PR. We've made a game-time adjustment to the plan and I'm going to take the next 4 days off, as the game-day peak is threatened, but a few days of rest and recover should correct that. We'll attempt a squat PR next tuesday, a bench PR (225) on thursday, and a dead (440) on Saturday. Then we'll do whatever feels right in the next 7 days.

By prior experience, we think that will be a serious back off on lower body stuff, but probably one real bench workout as late as 3-4 days before the meet.